The Downside Of Wish Fulfillment: The Exhausting Excess Of ‘Fate Of The Furious’

The Fate Of The Furious is basically the action movie equivalent of your dad catching you smoking a cigarette and making you finish the entire carton. I left the theater confused, drained, nauseous; feeling sick and queasy from something I thought I’d wanted, as if I’d just beer-bonged an entire package of Skittles. You win, dad, I regret everything.

Yes, the gang has come a long way since the days of stealing DVDs and “bullsh*t, asshole, no one likes the tuna here.” In this latest installment, the gang 1) outruns a nuclear submarine 2) which is being controlled remotely by a sexy hacker 3) over the arctic ice 4) while driving Lamborghinis. At one point, Tyrese snaps off the Lamborghini door and uses it as a bullet shield while single handedly taking out three Russian separatist soldiers with a pistol. Tyrese! And he’s supposed to be the buffoon of the group! (In the movie and in real life).

Which is to say, The Fate of the Furious is nothing if not boldly stupid, and before now I’d thought bold stupidity was the best thing about this franchise. It was never a question of abandoning its roots, because, as noted above, Fast‘s roots weren’t good. Michelle Rodriguez catching Paul Walker as he’s falling off a cliff by hooking him with her car’s spoiler as she drifts it by the cliff’s edge in Fast 7, that was good. Vin Diesel jumping a car from one skyscraper to another skyscraper, that was good. Virtually every scene in F8 is even more creatively preposterous than my favorite parts of 7 Fast 7 Furious, but somehow it’s less fun now. F8 took everything I thought I liked about this franchise and bludgeoned me with it for two and a half hours.

@CausticAvenger – No, this is definitely a review. In fact, since this one was published more recently, the official Uproxx company line is that this movie sucks. You’ll see that the other review now gets a “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes dot com where it would have been “fresh” last week.

Here’s my Hot Take: The new xXx movie was better than F8. This was almost too far up its own ass. Vin Diesel in his goddamn Darth Vader outfit buzzsawing open a limo was HILARIOUS…but they played it straight. xXx: Return of the Diesel at least seemed like it knew it was dumb as hell.

And replacing Paul Walker with Scott Eastwood was in poor taste, right? How badly do we need a super handsome, bland white guy on the team? But, in true F&F fashion, they went and found a more-handsome, shittier actor for the part. I appreciated that, at least.

To be fair, Vince only got on board the furious decked out train with the last one and then went back and liked one. It’s like cheering for the cowboys when they picked Dax and then yelling when they don’t make the playoffs.

Even just desribing the other films they sound ridiculous. I mean they used a car to bounce another car to safety THREE FILMS AGO! The series has always been beyond dumb with a sincerity that justifies the fun. I’ll take that over a million disney’s marvel’s avenger’s dr boring

What the hell?!? Charlize Theron is really super-duper hot. I know that for a fact. But you put her next to a photo of Angelina Jolie from 2000 and she turns into a hobgoblin and not even standing next to an oversized piece of silly putty like Vin Diesel makes no difference.

she appears to have joined the club of people who had toxins injected into her face. the whole face, not just the lips like Angelina might have. that sort of thing greatly impacts the way I see them at least.

I couldn’t have agreed more. Just saw it and was exhausted before 1/2 way point. I’m a HUGE fan of HDTGM amd watched it for what I hope will be an episode they do. I also think they will all be disappointed in the end.

I remember listening to them doing Furious 6 before i’d even had the chance to see the film, but when I finally did see it, their commentary was absolutely spot on. From the “mah faahhhmmly” to “car fucking”

I liked this one but agree with your general point. The first scene in the movie was F&F perfection, a ridiculous race with really idiotic dialogue and contrivances.

A general critique I have with this series, and the Marvel movies is the scale, after you’ve saved the earth from destruction once, doing it again becomes increasingly less interesting. It’s better to run these at a lower scale, saving a friend, saving a city; it’s enough to fight a drug gang or something without constantly making the stakes “the world”.

Came to comment the same thing, I keep looking at it, and it just looks like a still from some GTA IV car-crash mod. Even the stoplights and the buildings look like CGI. I am also curious if it looks more real in the actual film, because that doesn’t look like 2017 CGI to me.

Last year I was crashing at a friend’s place and the group made me pick the movie to watch, and I picked Pitch Black and everyone except one ended up going to sleep. Some people don’t understand the Diesel.

This movie was such a headache. An exercise in excess that is entertaining but at the same time it left a sour taste in my mouth. I get that they had to double down on the grandiosity after Fast Five but at this rate by the time we get to Fast and Furious 9 or 10 they’ll be driving in space and taking on The Avengers.
Going in to the movie I knew there was going to be a submarine chase and even knowing that didn’t prepare me for all the ridiculousness that was shoved in our faces.